Trulieve, one of the original licensed providers of medical marijuana in Florida, is challenging the constitutionality of a 2017 state law that places "arbitrary" caps on how many retail outlets each company can have across the state.

The statute, which limits medical marijuana treatment centers to 25 dispensaries each statewide, are unfair to licensees that submitted business plans before the law changed, the lawsuit argues. The cap on dispensaries expires April 1, 2020, and has the sole purpose of suppressing competition among the treatment centers, the lawsuit contends.

Furthermore, the caps were added long after the state awarded licenses to applicants that had already submitted business plans that included the number of dispensaries they planned to open around the state.

“This lawsuit is first and foremost about patient access. The current arbitrary caps are not just an after-the-fact restriction that was added after we were awarded a license, but they limit our ability to provide safe medical marijuana efficiently to our customers throughout Florida,” Trulieve CEO Kim Rivers said in a news release.

Trulieve has 13 dispensaries statewide with approval from the Department of Health to open a 14th. It is seeking approval for 13 more dispensary sites, which would bring its total to 27.

Other companies have opened a total of 17 dispensaries, mostly in heavily populated urban areas.

“The restrictions force us to use extremely expensive long-distance delivery and build dispensaries on a model based on geographic distribution, not where patients live,” Rivers continued. “This not only restricts access to patients in need, but forces higher prices. We believe these arbitrary and highly restrictive caps violate Florida’s Constitutional guarantee of safe medical cannabis to patients in need.”

Trulieve applied for a license as a dispensing organization in July 2015. At the time the state only allowed five licensees — one for each region of the state — to grow and distribute medical marijuana. Each licensee could open as many dispensaries as it felt its business could handle.

Several companies that had applied for a license and lost challenged the licensing process and were awarded additional licenses by the state.

In 2016 the Legislature amended the law to allow the sale of full-strength cannabis to eligible patients and automatically renewed license rights of the existing organizations, again without imposing limits on the number of retail outlets

In November 2016, voters overwhelmingly approved Amendment 2, which allowed a much broader group of patients to receive full strength medical marijuana. The amendment took effect on Jan. 3, 2017.

The Legislature convened a special session in July 2017 directing the Department of Health to issue medical marijuana treatment center licenses to existing distributors, and allow for the creation of additional treatment centers that met state qualifications.

The law limited those treatment centers to 25 dispensaries each, further subdividing the statewide quota into five regions based on population and not where patients are actually located.

DOH officials said they intend to limit Trulieve to 25 dispensaries, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit asks the court to let Trulieve keep the dispensary locations that have already been approved and applied for before the 2017 statute was enacted under its dispensing organization license, and be allowed to establish 25 more dispensaries under its treatment center license.

“Through limiting the number of locations a distributing organization can open, patients are not taken into consideration appropriately,” said Trulieve's lawyer, David Miller.

Contact Schweers at jschweers@tallahassee.com. Follow him on Twitter @jeffschweers.